I am different now.
I do not yearn anymore
to be the tide that lifts
but the hurricane
that capsizes every ship.
Audrey Ying, “jetsam”
astagesetforcatastrophe reblogged
“my mother strains thunderclouds in the colander and then wonders why our kitchen floods so often. i’ll have you know that the women in my family made mercy. in the 1960s, they held up half the sky and when they walked out under it, the sky begged like deer held at gunpoint. if this is what worship looks like inside out, it is the sound of knife against knife. so let me tell you the story of how a civilisation disappears.”
— astagesetforcatastrophe, from “ours”
repeat after me:
no man is a hospital.
science says you don’t get to choose
which part of the darkness you inherit
from your blood. yesterday, you try
to prove it wrong.
but today, you try
harder.
because too many times have you
let the wrong hands slice a hot knife into what
you have left laid open on the table.
you must shut every door on
your old self: the one that wheels herself
out on a gurney.
burn yourself clean instead,
phoenix girl.
Audrey Ying, “island”
My great-grandmother loses me to her mind.
I think of her memory like slow-cooked meat,
a thing that falls too easy off the bone. And then wonder if that is fate. If that is how all tender things must go.
Audrey Ying, fragment from “how to cook everything”
I call it resurrection,
forgiveness, peace —
climbing out of my old body
like it is the emergency exit
of a flipped vehicle,
limping away from
it & not once turning back
for the echo.
Audrey Ying, “t-bone”
astagesetforcatastrophe reblogged
“I know nothing of calm. Here, I worship entropy in the dark and everyone knows I am full of it — full of wanting to grow old with you and into you, full of this aching and shaking and adoring you so fiercely that it makes my hands unsteady from fear of spilling it all. Even the ground knows this: and it only creaks and creaks and creaks, so saturated with our rainstorm tenderness that I wonder how it carries it all without folding over but it is not me, and somehow it holds.”
— astagesetforcatastrophe, entropy
I grow up learning love is rainstorm. The right kind is so heavy it runs you all the way down to the ground.
Audrey Ying, “Rainstorm”
astagesetforcatastrophe reblogged
“for months, you turn back on yourself like the moon. you lie in the fields & offer your grief to ground but it refuses. night pours like syrup over your chest. tell it how you never want to call the thing that holds you a garden again.”
— astagesetforcatastrophe, night field
I love; therefore I
am ruthlessly holding you
up to the wrong light.
Audrey Ying, “Blindsided, 2020”
Didn’t rise in the east.
Didn’t grieve my grandmother’s silver thread buns.
Or whisper about the roads paved with silk.
Didn’t hold the language with chopsticks
or the parentheses around my given name.
Didn’t grow my hair out long and dark
like the longest day of the year.
Didn’t wear the jade or dream of apple-seed eyes.
Didn’t remove the makeup or peel away the scotch tape.
Didn’t breathe, didn’t carry the history
heavy underneath my fingernails.
Didn’t want or forgive. Didn’t love or go gentle.
Didn’t see myself made of yellow river in the west.
Audrey Ying, “Didn’t Rise” (after “Did Rise”)
You don’t know what it’s like to die yet.
You’re fearless. Courage larger than any cathedral.
The world is a bouquet clenched in your fists. The sky bows into sunrise & the ocean draws out to desert before your calloused feet. Here, the rain pours like chant praising your name.
You who crawled out of the mouth you once loved: bloodied but breathing.
Audrey Ying, from “oxygen hymn”
Didn’t you hear?
The town gossip has it that you were born in a waiting room. That your bark is only sorry and silence. But it doesn’t matter. They’ll put a muzzle over your wild anyway.
Because safe is always better than sorry and no one likes
a girl with teeth. But no one puts a cage around what they don’t fear.
Audrey Ying, “A Wild Becoming”
astagesetforcatastrophe reblogged
“Our mothers taught us everything. How to become every space we weren’t supposed to take. How to make ourselves full on empty & to swallow all the quiet until it became loud. They came dressed in lion’s skin & roaring, carrying us over one mountain so we could bring them over ten. So light the match: there is no bringing us back to ash and dust. We have become too good at burning.”
— astagesetforcatastrophe, inheritance (via astagesetforcatastrophe)
astagesetforcatastrophe reblogged
“You are not weak. You are full of spines and wars, scars and fire. You are fighting to carry a heart so heavy even Atlas cannot hold it up. There is all of this quiet, drowning kind of falling apart inside you and yet you are still breathing. You are still here. You are still here.”
— astagesetforcatastrophe, you are not weak (via astagesetforcatastrophe)
astagesetforcatastrophe reblogged
“i call persephone drowned comet for falling into the sternum of earth & then name every mourning dove after demeter. you know, this isn’t how it’s supposed to be: waking up waning beside the moonlight and grief as antlers pulled deep through the gut on the bed like operation table. they say your body can lose two pints of blood before it goes into shock. after that, everything else is fatal. do you know how that is? how does prometheus live then? how do i?”
— astagesetforcatastrophe, epitaph
you are prone to bad luck,
you think.
that after so many years,
a name can still be a chronic pang of hunger
& of course, you tried to forget.
but nothing is as good at dartboard as
fishbone-like memories pinned to the
back of your throat.
cut to the kitchen
where you are dicing onions
while laughing at the cruelty
of the concept:
how love is brined
like a slab of meat
as if salt can make it
hurt less, but brining is more like gravity:
only pulling everything
closer&closer to pain.
astagesetforcatastrophe, brined
#burning muse#quotes#alt lit#love#prose#poetry#poems#poem#poets on tumblr#poetic#poesia#spilled ink#ink#spilled thoughts#spilled words#spilled poetry#rejectscorner#rejects writing#rejects poetry#words#lit#prose poetry#an excerpt from a story i'll never write#excerpt from a book i'll never write#excerpts from my writing#fragments#experimental
ask.
& you do as they tell you,
hands twirling the locks of
the knotted phone cord.
it always goes to God’s voicemail box
but you ring the number anyway, calling it faith that
he listens to you
wishing for the windshield to shatter slower
in a head-on collision
like this one. watching from above
how you try loving your family with two hands
trying to hold too many parts together in
prayer.